3
controlled the body. For instance, when food leaves the stomach and enters the small intestine thepancreas
is
suddenly galvanized into activity and pours its digestive secretion into the duodenum. The food entering the intestine is bathed in the digestive juice and digestion proceeds.Here is an example of excellent organization. If the pancreas secreted its juices continuously that would represent a great waste, for most of the time the juices would be expended to no purpose.On the other hand, if the pancreas secreted its juices intermittently (as it does), the secretions wouldhave to synchronize perfectly with the food entering the intestine, or else not only would thesecretions be wasted but food would remain imperfectly digested.By 19th-century ways of thinking, the passage of food from the stomach into the smallintestine activated a nerve which then carried a message to the brain (or spinal cord). This, inresponse, sent a message down to the pancreas by way of another nerve, and as a result of thissecond message the pancreas secreted its juices. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that, rather unexpectedly, the body was found to possess organization outside the nervous System.
SECRETIN
In 1902 two English physiologists, William Maddock Bayliss and Ernest Henry Starling, werestudying the manner in which the nervous system controlled the behavior of the intestines and of theprocesses of digestion. They made the logical move of cutting all the nerves leading to the pancreasof their experimental animals. It seemed quite likely that the pancreas would fail to secrete digestivejuices at all, once the nerves were cut, whether food passed into the small intestine or not. That was
not
what happened, to the surprise of Bayliss and Starling. Instead, the denervatedpancreas behaved promptly on cue. As soon as food touched the intestinal lining, the pancreas beganpouring forth its juice. The two physiologists knew that the stomach contents were acid because of the presence of considerable hydrochloric acid in the stomach's digestive secretions. They thereforeintroduced a small quantity of hydrochloric acid into the small intestine, without food, and thedenervated pancreas produced juice. The pancreas, then, required neither nerve messages nor food,but only acid; and the acid needed to make no direct contact with the pancreas itself but only withthe intestinal lining. The next step was to obtain a section of intestine from a newly killed animal and soak it inhydrochloric acid. A small quantity of the acid extract was placed within the bloodstream of a living animal by means of a hypodermic needle. The animal's pancreas reacted at once and secreted juice,although the animal was fasting. The conclusion was clear. The intestinal lining reacted to the triggeraction of acidity by producing a chemical that was poured into the bloodstream. The bloodstreamcarried the chemical throughout the body to every organ, including the pancreas. When the chemicalreached the pancreas it somehow stimulated that organ into secreting its juice.Bayliss and Starling named the substance produced by the intestinal lining
secretin
(see-kree'tin;"separate" L), (In this book I shall follow the practice initiated in
The Human
) since it stimulated asecretion. This was the first clear example of a case in which efficient organization was found to beproduced by
means
of chemical messages carried by the bloodstream rather than electrical messagesof the nerves. Substances such as secretin are in act sometimes referred to rather informally as"chemical messengers."
*Body
of giving the pronunciations of possibly unfamiliar words. I shall also include the
meaning of
the key word from which it is derived with the initial - L, indicating the derivation to be from the Latin and G indicating it to be from theGreek. In this case, the derivation from "separate" refers to the fact that a cell forms a particular substance and separatesthat substance, so to speak, from itself discharging it into the bloodstream, into
the intestines, or upon
the outer surface of thebody. A secretion is thought of as being designed to serve a useful purpose, as, for instance, is true of the pancreatic juice. Where the separated material is merely being disposed of, it is an
excretion
("separate outside" L); thus urine is an excretion.
The more formal name was proposed in 1905, during the course of a lecture by Bayliss. Hesuggested the name -
hormone
("to arouse" G). The hormone secreted by one organ, you see, wassomething that aroused another organ to activity. The
name
was adopted, and
ever since it
has beenquite clear that the organization of the body is built on two levels: the electrical system of brain,spinal cord, nerves, and sense organs; and the chemical system of the various
hormones
and
hormone- colaborating organs.
Although the electrical organization of the body was recognized before the chemicalorganization was, in this book I shall reverse the order of time and consider the chemical
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